Yes netwrck AI chat platform.
Had to takedown some stuff
Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
11–20 of 40 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#12Seafood Paella...
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#13Yes, I created a leaderboard for programmers and recently found some people using it as motivation to sleep less, spending 18 hour energy drink fueled days coding for up to a month at a time. [0] > How do you feel about its impact Even though it's not healthy, I let it happen to a point. I reach out by email about the health impacts. Some people say, "I plan to stop at the end of the month". > have you taken steps, l…
That's amazing! It's a really healthy approach, and even though it could easily be automated, it's impressive that you take the time to personally connect with them.
By the way, I love your new venture and have already signed up. Wishing you all the best!
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#14Back in high school, we had a pascal programming class. The teacher had a rule, no video games on the computers unless you write them yourself. I think he was being tongue in cheek, but I wrote a few simple arcade games, and he was true to his word. But students started playing my games instead of working on the assignments. So he said no games until you turn in your assignment for the day. Not a very dramatic exampl…
That's such a fun story! I'm really impressed. Do you happen to still have any of those games around by any chance?
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#15Yes netwrck AI chat platform. Had to takedown some stuff
Looks like a fun platform. What happened?
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#16The developer of FlappyBird shared his thoughts on this problem: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of... > By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call…
This one genuinely didn't make much sense to me. My (conspiracy) guess is that Nintendo hit him with a really fat lawsuit (given the blatantly stolen art) and they came to some agreement that he'd pull the game if he could go out with a bang.
The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#17Back in high school, we had a pascal programming class. The teacher had a rule, no video games on the computers unless you write them yourself. I think he was being tongue in cheek, but I wrote a few simple arcade games, and he was true to his word. But students started playing my games instead of working on the assignments. So he said no games until you turn in your assignment for the day. Not a very dramatic exampl…
We had something similar back in 95. We had to write a LOGO program first if we wanted to play Dangerous Dave, Paratrooper, or Prince of Persia.
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#18The developer of FlappyBird shared his thoughts on this problem: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of... > By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call…
This one genuinely didn't make much sense to me. My (conspiracy) guess is that Nintendo hit him with a really fat lawsuit (given the blatantly stolen art) and they came to some agreement that he'd pull the game if he could go out with a bang. The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?
He was from Vietnam. Suing someone there for copyright infringement is like suing a chinese company for stealing an IP. It is not easy and it is not likely to go anywhere.
Also, he probably got enough money to retire. If it did get $50k a day, he probably got more than a million before he pulled it. In 2014 Vietnam, that amount is probably more than most can make their whole life.
Heck, even in the US now, most people probably still can't make more than a milllion...
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#19Around 2014 my company (a service provider for big enterprise, mostly telecom) was tasked with building dashboards for their operation center[1]. Think Nasa control centers, dark room with a bunch of people looking at monitors and a big array of TVs in the front.
They really liked the dashboards so we were tasked to build some more visualizations for them, one of which was a google-maps visualization of all the antennas with active alarms/errors and the field technicians they had in the country who went to fix those antennas. They had all the GPS info in their database from the technicians company-issued phone, but couldn't see it.
The people in the operation center said the biggest problem they had was technicians pretending or taking a long time to go to the antennas. The technicians apparently often stopped for 1-2 hour breaks at coffee shops[2]. They wanted to be able to track them live so they could see if they were actually working.
After a few months that map visualization got so popular that the COO of the org came directly to us (we had no interaction with him beforehand). He tasked us to build some dashboards to be used exclusively by him. He claimed that the biggest issue he had was people from lower layers hiding information from him and we, being a 3rd party, were trustworthy to give the right info.
This was very early in my career and I was surprised by how much cloak and dagger all the layers of the org treated each other. That telco was a massive company, sometimes I wonder if they still use the dashboards we built.
We used to joke that we probably got a lot of people fired. In retrospect that was the whole goal to begin with, but we didn't realize before we delivered those projects.
[1]: They had an array of 3 by 2 1080p 42'' TVs (6 total) in which they would put our dashboards on. The TVs were arranged as a single external monitor on their operations center. Being a single web application we had a lot of performance problems trying to render one browser tab in a 6k display in 2014.
[2]: Another big issue was a technician would claim that the weather was bad and they couldn't climb the antenna for safety reasons. So we added weather information to that map visualization.
Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?
#20The developer of FlappyBird shared his thoughts on this problem: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of... > By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call…
This one genuinely didn't make much sense to me. My (conspiracy) guess is that Nintendo hit him with a really fat lawsuit (given the blatantly stolen art) and they came to some agreement that he'd pull the game if he could go out with a bang. The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?
He made enough to live the rest of his life in luxury. And it wasn’t just online, the attention bled into his personal life.
> As news hit of how much money Nguyen was making, his face appeared in the Vietnamese papers and on TV, which was how his mom and dad first learned their son had made the game. The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents’ house, and he couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small price to pay for such fame and fortune, for Nguyen the attention felt suffocating. “It is something I never want,” he tweeted. “Please give me peace.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of...
Moreover, you can’t understate the psychological impact. For comparison, the success of Kony 2012 caused Jason Russel (its creator) to have a mental breakdown and run in the streets naked. And all Dong Nguyen did was post a few cryptic tweets, then decide that after he made far beyond enough money for anything he could have realistically dreamed of just a few weeks ago, he was ok with making less money from then on (he still made ad revenue from existing downloads) in exchange for less attention. It's actually impressive how well he kept his sanity during the ordeal.